Whoopi Goldberg recalls lobbying Gene Rodenberry for Star Trek: The Next Generation, explains why she opted to stay on The View for the Trump era

Vulture

In a wide-ranging Vulture interview, Goldberg recalled lobbying Gene Roddenberry for a role on Star Trek: TNG after trying to get LeVar Burton to lobby on her behalf. "I said, 'Listen, I have watched science fiction my whole life, and Star Trek is the only time that I ever saw Black people in the future," she said. "'Not only was it a Black woman in the future, but she was in charge of communications. She wasn’t serving coffee. So for some little girl, I would like to be what Nichelle (Nichols) was for me.'" Goldberg also admits she was ready to leave The View in 2016, but her daughter convinced her to stay on. "I felt it would be important to talk about things he would do, like surrounding himself with people whose first priority really wasn’t the United States, where he was talking about people in the sh*ttiest of ways," she says. "And I thought I needed to just keep talking about that — that that’s not what we do in this country. Listen, America has got lots of issues, but we’re a fairly decent group of people."